Page 106 of Savior

She licked her cracked lips and shifted against the concrete. “I’ll take that as a no. Look, I know we’ve had our differences—”

“If you’re tryin’ to apologize, you’re about eleven years too late. You took my children, only your God can save you now.”

Tears fell onto her cheeks. “Is that why you’re doing this? To get back at me?”

“Look around you, Norma,” I growled. “It look like I’m in charge of a goddamned thing?”

She cleared her throat and blinked away the moisture in her eyes before jutting her chin up at me in defiance. “I did what I thought was best for those girls. Celia was gambling—”

“Is that what you think? Jesus, you’ve got no fuckin’ clue what your daughter went through. All you ever cared about was how it made you look.” My vision blurred, forcing my head back down to the mattress with a grunt.

“You’re bleeding again.” The chains around her wrists rattled as she slowly made her way over to my cot. The cold metal brushed against my skin as she examined the wounds on my chest and shoulder. “Jamie, they’re looking worse.”

“Probably because they’re gettin’ worse,” I noted dryly, wondering again why Saint was keeping the two of us alive. It had been weeks since they dragged us from a building that looked a hell of a lot like my storage facility, driving for hours over rough terrain until we reached what had become our new home.

The walls might’ve been different, but it was still the same hellhole as before.

“You need a doctor and strong antibiotics—”

“I know this is gonna come as a shock to you, but we ain’t exactly at a resort—”

The large door vibrated as it was unlocked from the outside, and we fell silent. Norma cowered between the head of the cot I was tied down to and the wall, using my body as a shield when she saw who it was.

Cobra had been gone for weeks, leaving us in the care of men who weren’t comfortable laying a hand on an elderly woman but seemed to have no qualms about beating the shit out of me.

I’d almost come to believe that Saint had redistributed him.

The lines on his face seemed more pronounced as if he’d been gone for years. Cobra snagged a chair, the metal legs scraping loudly against the concrete as he dragged it over to us, but there was no grin or reminders of what day it was as he sank down onto it.

“Grey…” He paused. “Something happened—”

“Your boy Saint get cold feet on killin’ us all of a sudden?” I taunted, even as the hairs on my neck and arms lifted. “That why you’ve been gone for so long?”

He shook his head. “It’s about your son—”

Mikey?

“Son?” Norma moved in front of me to face Cobra, fear suddenly forgotten. “He doesn’t have a son. He has two daugh—”

I flinched as fragments from the cinderblock wall rained down from above my head before watching Norma drop to her knees with a forced exhale.

“Shut the fuck up,” he calmly stated before kicking something away from his shoe. It hit the wall and bounced off before I realized it was a piece of her skull.

Norma fell to the side, facing me, her eyes blinking rapidly as if she couldn’t fathom how she’d ended up on the floor. Bloody bubbles of saliva burst from between her still moving lips.

Cobra slipped the gun into the holster at his shoulder and fell against the back of the chair with a muttered, “Fuck… Fuck!”

I kept my focus on the woman who’d brought my wife into the world, wondering if she’d struck a bargain with the devil himself to stay above ground. Her eyes, which hadn’t been focused on any specific thing, suddenly locked on mine as she mouthed one word, over and over again.

Celia.

Her body began convulsing and then, whatever deal she’d made, expired.

I felt nothing.

“Grey.” There was something in his voice that made me look up at him. It sounded like regret. “There’s no easy way to say this, but your son was—”

“No,” I growled, feeling as though the cot was spinning out beneath me. I lifted my left wrist, testing the limits of the restraints. “Don’t you fuckin’ say it—”

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